The first big mistake I made as a DBA was coming to work with my zipper wide open. But I digress.Hear one of my most popular session via streaming media at SQLSentry.TV!Microsoft SQL Server is easier to administrate than any other relational database on the market. But “easier than everyone else” doesn’t mean it’s easy. And it doesn’t ...

(Originally appearing at http://kevinekline.com/2013/10/09/wait-statistics-in-sql-server/).When it comes to troubleshooting in relational databases, there's no better place to start than wait statistics. In a nutshell, a wait statistic is an internal counter that tells you how long the database spent waiting for a particular ...

Last month, I began a series of articles describing database application benchmarking. In the first article, I told you about different ways that you can construct your own database application benchmark. However, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The Transaction Processing Council (www.tpc.org) has already created a large number of ...

Let's talk about database application benchmarking.This is a skill set which, in my opinion, is one of the major differentiators between a journeyman-level DBA and a true master of the trade. In this article published in my monthly column at Database Trends & Applications magazine, I'll give you a brief introduction to TPC benchmarks and, ...

The best emotion to describe how I'm feeling is 'astounded'. I'm astounded that I'm in such august company to be speaking the SQLIntersection (#iSQL) conference. Read the blog post from my first SQL Server mentor, Kimberly Tripp, which tells you all about SQLintersection.Check out this list of speakers:Aaron Bertrand, ...

Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about ...

The PerfMon Counters That Just Won't DieOne of the things that's simultaneously great and horrible about the Internet is that once something gets posted out in the ether, it basically never goes away. (Some day, politicians will realize this. We can easily fact check their consistency). Because of longevity of content posted to ...

Join me and Eric Brown, Quest Software senior product manager for SQL Server monitoring tools, as we discuss the server health-check capabilities of Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) in this previously recorded webcast. We delve into techniques to maximize your SCOM investment as well as ways to complement it with deeper ...

I hope you've taken a few minutes to peek in on the nice refresh that's happened on a bunch of the System Center engineering blogs. Good things are afoot there. And if you haven't checked in, avail yourself of these great resources:System Center: Service ManagerSystem Center: Operations ManagerSystem Center: Virtual Machine ...